Posts tagged Movie
The Adjustment Bureau Movie Review: A Simple Answer to a Complex Question
Mar 5th
Freewill vs. Fate. Philosophers and religious theorist have debated this question for year and now The Adjustment Bureau tries to explore this heavy and complicated subject in less than two hours without really including religion or philosophy into the plot.
Would you try to tempt fate if you found out your entire life was planned? That’s the basic premise of the film based on a love story and how you choose the person you are with.
The Plot:
Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau stars Matt Damon as David Norris, a politician running for Senate. He loses the 2006 political campaign for New York Senate and just as he is about to give his concession speech when he meets ballerina, Elise. Because of her influence he gives an amazing speech that boosts his popularity again. He sees the woman three weeks later completely by chance.
Only problem: he was never supposed to see Elise again. The Adjustment Bureau has to intervene and reveal its secret – they are an agency with greater power on earth to ensure everyone follows their predetermined paths. David doesn’t accept this and believes he is supposed to be with Elise, so he does everything he can to ensure they can be together.
David tries to outrun the agency who continuously puts obstacles in his way to stop him. For convenience sake, the agency cannot track people in the rain or near water, and they can only jump time and space when wearing certain hats. This little limitation helps David later in the film.
The Good:
The romantic in me loves the idea that there is someone for everyone and found the struggle and fight to be together endearing and satisfying. The realist in me found the entire plot to be a little corny and too simple to truly make us believe that we have absolutely no free will.
The acting was actually really good and made the film quite entertaining. Matt Damon is good a rebellious man who won’t take no for an answer. He has this charming determined quality throughout the film and you are rooting for him to outrun his own fate. Impossible as that sounds.
Mad Men’s John Slattery is one of the men on the Adjustment Bureau and he looks damn fine in a suit. I can’t help but think of his mad men character and it was a little distracting – but in a good way. Blunt and Damon share some great scenes together and they have great onscreen chemistry. Emily Blunt can deliver sarcastic lines and still stay completely charming and lovable.
The Bad:
The first 3/4 of the film is actually riveting and entertaining — keeping you guessing about what will happen next and how David will evade the forces working against him. But the ending fell completely flat. Everything worked out for the best in the end, but the explanation for why it happened was too simple and didn’t take into consideration what the entire movie was trying to make you think about in the first place.
The relationship between the two characters seems extremely sloppy and rushed. You want to believe they are in love, but can’t quite understand how they got there so quickly. The film tries to explain the instant connection by revealing that the two were meant to be together in another path of their lives, but it seems rushed and we are left still a little confused.
Overall, the film was a little disappointing in the end. They didn’t touch on any of the deeper issues of fate vs. freewill and it actually ended up confusing the matter even more, which was probably the point, but it felt rushed and incomplete. More explanation and exploration of the sci-fi aspect of the film would have made for better entertainment and a little more clarity.
From www.reelmovienews.com
Happythankyoumoreplease: movie review
Mar 4th
Josh Radnor, the TV star from “How I Met Your Mother,” has a hang-loose affability in the annoyingly titled “Happythankyoumoreplease,” which henceforth I will refer to as “HTYMP.” Radnor also wrote and directed the film, which won an audience award at the 2010 Sundance film festival. Audience winners at that festival tend to be quirky-goofy exercises in navel-gazing. Lo and behold, “HTYMP” does not disappoint.
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Radnor’s Sam is a would-be novelist who lives a scroungy bachelor existence in New York. His avoidance of “commitment” – he’s OK with one-night stands – is put to the test when he is smitten by a local bartender and aspiring cabaret singer nicknamed Mississippi (Kate Mara) who, as fate would have it, hails from Mississippi.
Hoping for something more than an overnighter with the equally smitten barmaid, Sam suggests she move in with him for three days. What he has forgotten to tell her is that he has unofficially adopted a mixed-race 8-year-old boy, Rasheen (Michael Algieri), whom earlier in the week he watched being abandoned on a subway train. Mississippi is understandably confused and upset, but Sam, who doesn’t seem to realize he’s leaving himself open to kidnapping charges, promises to set things right – eventually.
As if this weren’t enough baggage for one movie, especially an indie movie, Radnor front-loads the proceedings with further complications. Sam’s best friend, Annie (Malin Akerman), who suffers from an immune-deficiency disorder that leaves her bereft of body hair, is trying to extricate herself from an on-off relationship with a crum bum Lothario (Peter Scanavino) while, at the same time, fending off the advances of a supernice-guy lawyer (Tony Hale) in her office building. His name is Sam, so she dubs him Sam No. 2. He’s ordinary-looking but ardent, which means that, between the two of them, we are primed for much beauty-is-on-the-inside jabber. And then there’s Sam’s friend Mary Catherine (Zoe Kazan) and her boyfriend, Charlie (Pablo Schreiber), who are in turmoil because he may have a good job prospect in Los Angeles, a city that Mary Catherine, never having spent time there, likens to Hades. She is also, unbeknownst to him, pregnant.
Did “HTYMP” start out as three separate movies? Sometimes filmmakers, particularly of the young and underfunded variety, cram too much plot into their films because they are afraid they might never get the chance to make another. For audiences, the upside to this quandary is that if one story line isn’t that interesting, another one will come along soon enough to break up the tedium.
Unless, of course, all the stories are tedious. In the case of “HTYMP,” I found the Mary Catherine-Charlie confab borderline blah (though Kazan is good). The Annie-Sam No. 2 narrative is beyond predictable, but Akerman, her head turbaned in colorful scarves for most of the movie, is at least lively, and Hale gives nerds a good name.
That leaves Sam-Mississippi-Rasheen. The point of this story line seems to be a showcase for Sam’s innate goodness. I kept asking myself how this good guy could afford to support himself, let alone an 8-year-old boy. Is he any good as a novelist?
The answers to these and sundry other questions are left twisting in the wind. But Radnor has an agenda here: He wants to make a movie that is, as he has stated in interviews, “defiantly uncynical.”
That’s fine – cynicism in the movies is often as flip as bubble-headed optimism, and lots more prevalent. But the happy endings in “HTYMP,” as sweet as they are to experience, seem more engineered than inevitable. Grade: B- (Rated R for language.)
From www.csmonitor.com
‘Avengers’ movie to be filmed in Cleveland this summer
Mar 4th
CLEVELAND — A major motion picture, “The Avengers,” is going to be shot in Cleveland.
Gov. John Kasich made the announcement Thursday prior to Mayor Frank Jackson’s State of the City Speech.
The movie is based on the Marvel Comics superhero team. The movie will start shooting soon. Reportedly, movie personnel are in town already scouting locations.
The film will bring some big name actors reprising their roles from earlier movies. Robert Downey Jr. will be Iron Man, Samuel L. Jackson will be Nick Fury and Scarlett Johansson will be the Black Widow.
Wayne Hill, chairman of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, called this “the largest film ever shot in Ohio.”
It will mean a significant number of jobs.
The movie was set to be shot in Detroit but Michigan’s governor planned to eliminate tax credits. The picture will get tax advantages for shooting in Ohio.
“I’m thrilled we’re are going to have this here. I’m just bucking for a part as Governator 2,” Kasich said.
From www.marionstar.com
DreamWorks options movie rights to WikiLeaks books
Mar 4th
By Natalie Abrams,
DreamWorks has optioned the rights to two books about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in hopes of eventually turning them into a film, Reuters reports.
Assange, 39, is an international hot topic after releasing classified documents. He is currently facing extradition from Britain to Sweden over alleged sex crimes.
Check out the rest of today’s news
The first book is WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding. The second, Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website” by Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who worked with Assange.
Would you see a film about WikiLeaks?
View original DreamWorks Options Movie Rights to WikiLeaks Books at TVGuide.com
Related Articles on TVGuide.com
- Check out the rest of today’s news
View the original article on TVGuide.com
From www.wqow.com
Movie Review | Beastly Update of classic tale a beauty
Mar 4th
The first good movie of the new year happens to be a “tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme.”
Beastly is a high-school nonmusical updating of Beauty and the Beast. Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny, it lets Vanessa Hudgens shine and Alex Pettyfer give a hint of what all the fuss over him is about.
Pettyfer is spot-perfect as handsome, vain and cruel Kyle, the son of a rich TV anchorman (Peter Krause), who taught him that “People like people who look good.” Thus, Kyle’s lifelong aversion to “hatchet faces,” “guts with butts” and “fattycakes.” But Kyle, the arrogant king of Buckston Academy, is playing with fire when he taunts the school’s resident witch.
Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen, awesome) may be “Frankenskank” to Kyle. But she’s not just dressing like Stevie Nicks and living Rhiannon. She casts a spell. Kyle loses his hair and sprouts scars, pustules and veins that look like the roots of a dying tree. Shallow Kyle has a year to make somebody see past his hideous appearance, repent and make himself worthy of someone’s love.
Hudgens ( High School Musical) gives her least-mannered, most realistic performance as Lindy, a smart girl stuck with a junkie dad who has violent enemies. That allows beastly Kyle, calling himself Hunter, to take her into hiding in his penthouse, to build a greenhouse to grow her roses and to win her by thinking first of her and not of himself.
Writer-director Daniel Barnz ( Phoebe in Wonderland) turns Miami novelist Alex Flinn’s tale into a showcase of glib dialogue and scene-stealing supporting players. Neil Patrick Harris shows up and lands roughly a laugh a minute as Will, the blind tutor as quick with a put-down as he is with sound advice. “Cage the rage,” kid, he suggests. And “Lose your smarts, blondes will be making jokes about you.”
Lisa Gay Hamilton ( The Soloist) turns a cliche – a Jamaican housekeeper who tries to help Kyle find his way to kindness – into a minor triumph.
The film sags into trite melodrama at times, and Barnz can’t keep the wish-fulfillment fantasy at bay (he may be ugly, but this Beast is still richer than Midas) in the third act. But the movie offers great life lessons about superficiality and overcoming your parents’ prejudices.
And Beastly is the first movie from the year-old CBS Films to suggest a niche that the network’s movie division could fill: smart, well-directed teen fantasies.
From www.dispatch.com
Superheroes Coming to Town for Movie Shoot
Mar 4th
A Hollywood blockbuster film featuring a team of superheros is coming soon to Cleveland!
The movie is called ‘The Avengers’ and is set to hit theaters in May 2012. Part of the filming will take place in Cleveland at the end of this summer.
The announcement came during Thursday’s State of the City address at the City Club in Cleveland. According to Ohio Governor John Kasich, Marvel Studios dropped Michigan after it froze the tax credit. Thanks to Ohio’s ‘motion picture tax credit,’ the studios landed an agreement with Cleveland.
The comic-book movie will feature characters like ‘Thor,’ ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Captain America.’
The all-star cast includes Robert Downey, Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans and Mark Ruffalo.
Ivan Schwarz with the Greater Cleveland Film Commission said this will be the biggest film ever in Ohio.
“It’s about the jobs and the economic development it brings to the region. This is part of creating an industry where people who want to work in the film industry 24-7 have the opportunity to do that,” said Schwarz. He added there will be plenty of opportunities for “extra roles” and huge crowd scenes.
Local comic book enthusiasts are thrilled. “Seeing ‘The Avengers’ filmed in Cleveland, that’s going to be exciting. That’s going to be a really cool thing,” said John Shearer.
Shearer is the manager of ‘Carol and John’s’ Comic Shop at Kamm’s Corner on the city’s westside. “This is the big superheros, having them all together is a pretty big deal.”
Other parts of the movie will be filmed in New York and New Mexico. The exact filming locations for Cleveland have not been announced.
From www.fox8.com
Harmon to star in USA’s ‘Prey’ movie
Mar 4th
Actor Mark Harmon arrives at the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on September 16, 2007. (UPI Photo/Jim Ruymen) 
LOS ANGELES, March 3 (UPI) — USA Network says it has acquired the rights to develop a 2-hour movie starring Mark Harmon based on the series of “Prey” novels by John Sandford.
The announcement was made Thursday by Jeff Wachtel, president of USA original programming and co-head of original content at Universal Cable Productions.
Michael Jaffe and Howard Braunstein of Jaffe-Braunstein Films will produce the movie, which is set to begin production in May.
Chris Gerolmo adapted the script from the novel, “Certain Prey.” In addition to starring as the book’s main character, Minneapolis Deputy Police Chief Lucas Davenport, Harmon will executive produce alongside Jaffe and Braunstein.
“Mark Harmon could read the phone book and we’d probably want to put it on the air,” Wachtel said in a statement Thursday. “With Mark, Chris, Howard and Michael bringing to life the iconic character of Lucas Davenport — that really promises to be something special.”
Harmon’s small-screen credits include “NCIS,” “Chicago Hope,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Moonlighting” and “The West Wing.”
From www.upi.com
Movie review: ‘Beastly’ is ghastly
Mar 3rd
Toolbar sponsor: David Stanley Ford
Movie review: ‘Beastly’ is ghastly Movie review: As the inevitable teen-emo restyling of “Beauty and the Beast,” “Beastly” is a monstrous romance rendered truly scary by a shockingly tone-deaf script and bursts of fearsome overacting. It stars Alex Pettyfer, Vanessa Hudgens, Mary-Kate Olsen and Neil Patrick Harris.
As the inevitable teen-emo restyling of “Beauty and the Beast,” “Beastly” is a monstrous romance rendered truly scary by a shockingly tone-deaf script and bursts of fearsome overacting. Engage this beast at one’s own risk.
“Beastly” gets ugly immediately with the introduction of Kyle (Alex Pettyfer of “I Am Number Four”), a smug Type-A weasel running for student council president at a glass-and-metal private school with no apparent classrooms. The place looks like a supercharged law firm overrun by privileged teenagers. Kyle stands out among the unpleasantly self-satisfied student body thanks to a campaign speech cribbed substantially from Tom Cruise’s motivational speaker in “Magnolia.” The only thing that could possibly redeem him would be a sudden disappearance.
This actually happens thanks to student witch Kendra (Mary-Kate Olsen), whom Kyle baits and insults as frequently as she changes hairstyles — her follicles morph about three times in the film’s first 10 minutes. In return, she casts a disfiguring spell on Kyle, leaving him looking like a war-scarred Romulan that was attacked by a Goth tattoo artist. The only way he can break the spell is by getting someone to fall in love with him in a year, and considering his vile world view, that is a tough order to fill.
Kyle’s anchorman father (Peter Krause of “Parenthood”) cannot stand the sight of him, so he banishes Kyle to his own comfortable apartment in an outer borough, where he is joined by Jamaican housekeeper Zola (Lisa Gay Hamilton with a fake patois) and conveniently blind tutor Will (Neil Patrick Harris). All the while, Kyle pines away for Lindy (Vanessa Hudgens), the beautiful, free-spirited classmate he met shortly before becoming stylishly hideous.
Lindy’s father is a junkie who has fallen behind on his drug payments, yet can apparently still cover Lindy’s private school tuition. One night, when skulking outside Lindy’s apartment building, Kyle saves her father from a dealer. Kyle then persuades the dad that Lindy should bunk with his makeshift family until everything blows over.
All of these improbable plot turns would be hard to swallow, but writer-director Daniel Barnz executes “Beastly” with such haphazard artlessness that the total package becomes nearly intolerable. Sharp outcroppings of clunky dialogue draw unintentional laughter, central conflicts evaporate thanks to convenient text messages rather than on-screen action, and Pettyfer expresses frustration with oversized, explosive gestures and fits. There is no middle range with Pettyfer’s performance: He overplays or underplays, and neither strategy works.
Hudgens is fine at playing the sweet bohemian, but chemistry with Pettyfer never materializes. In fact, Lindy barely expresses any shock at her suitor’s baroque disfigurement, so she has nothing substantial to overcome in order to fall in love with Kyle. As for Harris, Krause and Hamilton, none of their roles requires the skills these actors possess — they must have lost a bet. Sure, the film probably will find some favor with undiscriminating “Twilight” fans looking for a stopgap while the teen vampire saga recharges, but for everyone else, “Beastly” is mostly ghastly.
— George Lang
From newsok.com
Diane Lane is Martha Kent in Superman Reboot Movie
Mar 3rd
Diane Lane is Martha Kent in Superman Reboot Movie March 03, 2011
Last night Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures formally announced that Diane Lane has inked a deal to star as Martha Kent in Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot film.
Lane joins Henry Cavill as Clark Kent / Superman, the only other actor attached to the project who has been confirmed by the studio. Rumors suggest Kevin Costner could sign a deal to play Martha’s husband, Jonathan Kent. Warner Bros. has yet to either confirm or deny that report.
Snyder considers the role of Martha Kent integral to his film as the character helps shape who Superman is with her wisdom and values.
The untitled Superman project won’t be in theaters until December 2012. Christopher Nolan and Deborah Snyder are producing based off a screenplay from David S. Goyer that is derived from a story by Goyer and Nolan.
Diane Lane is no stranger to acting having starred in numerous films throughout her career and Superman won’t be her first film based on a comic book. She appeared in the 2008 film Jumper alongside Hayden Christensen and Samuel L. Jackson. That film was also coincidentally co-written by David S. Goyer.
From www.thehdroom.com
Spielberg plans WikiLeaks movie
Mar 3rd
THE story of whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks is set to be turned into a movie by STEVEN SPIELBERG.
The mogul has bought the rights to a book about the site and its controversial founder JULIAN ASSANGE.
WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, chronicles the life of the internet activist, the 2006 creation of the site and the recent leaking of highly-sensitive classified documents related to the War On Terror.
In the past, Assange, who is fighting extradition to Sweden over allegations of sexual assault, has published information on human rights issues, including Guantanamo Bay procedures, state ordered murders in Kenya and the dumping of toxic waste on The Ivory Coast.
In 2010, he made headlines for weeks with the leaking of US diplomatic cables and classified documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Although Spielberg is yet to comment on the movie, the success of Social Network has paved the way for films about internet innovators.
Many in Hollywood thought the story of Facebook founder MARK ZUCKERBERG was impossible to bring to the big screen.
But movie, The Social Network, which stars JESSE EISENBERG and ANDREW GARFIELD, was a huge hit, winning several awards including the Best Picture at the Golden Globes.
From www.thesun.co.uk
